The Word Heard ’Round the World By Our Man in the Cloud Today’s Wordle answer—mercifully still un-Googled by the disciplined—is “PLANE.” Five innocuous letters that, in ordinary times, would elicit nothing more than a smug green-square tweet and a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Yet on this particular morning, as Kyiv’s air-raid sirens harmonize with Jakarta’s dawn…
Rick Stein and the Global Shrinking of the World’s Frying Pan By a correspondent who has eaten his way through three passports and still feels empty Padstow, Cornwall—population 2,065, seagulls uncounted—should be too small to matter on the planetary stage. Yet Rick Stein, the 77-year-old television chef with the expression of a man perpetually smelling…
The planet’s last respectable mirage, the word “oasis,” has been dragged out of the sand again. This time it is not a lonely clump of date palms luring thirsty caravans, but a British reunion tour—five middle-aged men from Manchester who once convinced the world that sneering and tambourines were a philosophy. Tickets for Oasis Live…
PlayStation Secret Lairs MTG: When Corporate Cross-Over Fever Reaches Pandemic Levels by our man in the departure lounge, Geneva The news that Sony’s PlayStation division has brewed yet another “Secret Lair” drop for Magic: The Gathering landed in my inbox while I was watching a Zurich financier try to expense a €42 bottle of water…
Avatar Reclaims the Crown: How a Blue-Skinned Allegory About Colonialism Became Capitalism’s All-Time Cash Cow By “Jet-Lagged” Javier Marín, Dave’s Locker International Correspondent BURBANK, Tuesday—Somewhere between a COP28 press conference and the latest BRICS summit, James Cameron quietly reminded the planet that nothing unites us like watching ten-foot-tall turquoise eco-vegans defeat thinly veiled American mining…
The 27th Birthday of a Search Engine That Knows Too Much International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Today, somewhere between a missile test in Pyongyang and the 347th cryptocurrency meltdown this fiscal quarter, Google turns twenty-seven—an age at which most humans are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. Google, however, already…
Anthony Bourdain Was the Last Diplomat We Ever Sent Overseas—And We Didn’t Even Notice He Was Gone PARIS—Somewhere between a bowl of bun bo Hue in Saigon and a michelada in Tijuana, Anthony Bourdain convinced the planet that dinner could double as statecraft. While career ambassadors were busy stapling talking points to one another in…
Marvel, the corporate colossus that once sold ten-cent comics to kids who could still dream without pharmaceutical assistance, now stands as the planet’s most efficient exporter of spandex theology. From Lagos cineplexes to Siberian streaming queues, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the lingua franca of a planet too exhausted to invent its own myths….
Bill Burr, the Red-Faced Oracle of Our Global Meltdown By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the 19th nervous breakdown of the Eurozone and the 47th Marvel spin-off trailer, Bill Burr has emerged as the unlikeliest cartographer of universal despair. The balding Bostonian—equal parts pit bull and philosophy major who got kicked out for heckling…
Jacob Elordi: How One Very Tall Australian Became the Planet’s Last Universal Export Brisbane, 1997: a baby is born who will eventually grow to six-foot-five and be shipped to Los Angeles in a crate marked “Euphoric Talent, Handle With Care.” Twenty-six years later, that same crate has circled the globe so many times it now…
31 Atlas: A Cartographic Joke with No Punchline By “World-Weary” Watanabe, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Despair lies the 31 Atlas, a new, crowd-sourced map that claims to chart “the world as it actually exists, minus the delusions.” Released last Tuesday by an anonymous collective that…
Quentin Tarantino: The Last American Auteur Exporting Revenge Fantasies to a World Already Overflowing with Them Dave’s Locker – International Bureau, somewhere between Cannes and the 38th parallel By the time the credits rolled on Pulp Fiction in 1994, the planet had already stockpiled enough Kalashnikovs to make every “Royale with Cheese” crack feel like…
